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How to optimize the energy efficiency of your data center?

For people working for big companies, it’s obvious that businesses constantly need to keep a close watch on their expenses. They should especially focus on their data center cost. In this article, you will find a few tips for optimizing data center energy efficiency.

Of course, not every company can afford a private data center but these tips are also applicable for server rooms with one or a few racks.

Audit of your data center electrical systems

Before undertaking any change, the first thing to do is to organize a data center audit about its energy consumption. In effect, you cannot take any action if you don’t measure anything. Thanks to the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)1, the metric used to check the performance of a data center or your server room, you’ will be able to know what your starting situation is. With a DCIM solution you will automatically measure the PUE and monitor the consumption of your hardware.

Keep an eye on rack power distribution

A good way to obtain a green data center is to choose intelligent PDU’s linked to a DCIM power solution. What are they going to change? Everything !

It is quite common to find excessive servers plugged into a rack power strip. You could use 1 server instead of 5 if you combine applications or virtualize your servers. Thanks to the information collected by a PDU with outlet level metering, you will detect them easily.

Additionally, old hardware devices can have terrible power consumptions. For example, you can just replace an older version of a data center server by a newer model and save more than 400€ in energy per year! The iPDU and the DCIM power solution will also detect them.

Finally, would you leave your TV on while at work? Of course not ! So why should your production servers or other data center equipment be left on during non-peak hours? With the intelligent PDU, you will perform safe shutdowns remotely without losing any data when servers aren’t needed and switched back on when necessary.

These were some tips to help you optimize the energy efficiency of your IT but there are more ways to do it. In a future post, we will be discussing data center environment sensors which are a good way to control the temperature of a rack in order to reduce cooling systems costs.

1 To find the PUE, divide the amount of power used by the facility by the power used to feed the IT device.